Articles - > WinDVD Review

Title:	WinDVD Review
Description:	A comprehensive review of Intervideo/Corel WinDVD, one of the world's most popular DVD player software
Author/Publisher:	Digital Digest
Ease of use:	Beginners
Software Used:	WinDVD
Page Viewed:	323063 times

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muchfedup: I upgraded last year from preinstalled...
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Page 2 of 4: What's new in WinDVD 2010

This page tries to list all the significant new features of WinDVD 2010 (as compared to WinDVD 9.0) - the actual review of WinDVD is on the next page.
Index :

New Product Versions
New Video Features
New Interface Features
Other Features

New Product Versions

WinDVD's versioning has been simplified, and now only two versions are available: Standard and Pro. Please note that HD DVD support is no longer available in WinDVD 2010.

The Pro version adds the following to the Standard version:

Blu-ray playback, including full BD-Live (Profile 2.0) support
CPU-accelerated upscaling for smoother playback of your DVD-Video on high-definition display. Upscale DVD-video to fit your HD display, regardless of the platform!
Support for HD video formats like AVCHD, AVCREC, BD-R/BD-RE and BD-ROM
Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD
Dolby Headphone/Dolby Virtual Speaker/Dolby Pro Logic IIx™
Trimension All2HD

New Video Features

AVCHD support has been enhanced with further support for the AVCREC format.

GPU acceleration, especially for HD content, has become standard and WinDVD has improved compatibility with both Nvidia and ATI based GPU acceleration solutions. For details of just how much of an improvement, if there are any, flick to the next page for the full review which will compare the CPU usage of PowerDVD 9, WinDVD 9 and WinDVD 2010 for Blu-ray playback.

The major feature of the last version, All2HD, has been enhanced as well. All2HD upconverts all SD materials to HD using various enhancement techniques to sharpen the resulting upscaled image. There are some comparison pics over in the review on the next page.

New Interface Features

The interface of WinDVD 2010 is completely new. It has been streamlined for faster performance, uses transparency to good effect. The new interface also supports Windows 7 Touch. Below are some sample screenshots of the new interface:

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Article Navigation:

Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: What's new in WinDVD 2010 <--
Page 3: Full Review of WinDVD 2010
Page 4: WinDVD 2010 Review Conclusions/Ratings

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User Comments:

I upgraded last year from preinstalled WinDVD 5 to WinDVD 7 Platinum on a brand new Toshiba Qosmio player W pro SP2 MCE. Wasn't too impressed as the program only starts when it wants. Sometimes ok, sometimes I get nothing at all on double click. Support never replied. This year, I decided to write over this failed install and upgraded to WinDVD 8 Platinum. The install process went fine, wrote over a perfectly fine, registered and up to date version of Quick Time. the installer then downloaded a newer(...) version of Windows installer, went through the install process and left me at the end with an error 1628 failed installation. I can see WinDVD 8 in c/program file but if i click on the exe file, it first sends me to a registration page, then asks me if i would like to take part into some kind of online survey and then I get a Windows error, would you like to send the file to Microsoft. I repeated the same full process several times emptying the temp file every time. No program icon has been created, no short cut in the start menu, no entry in the "add remove program". Arghhhhhhh. How do I get rid of it. I tried contacting support @ intervideo through their automated link and received an email bak: user unknown. I tried "sales" with the same result. Their agent in the UK doesn't answer the phone. I finally managed to send an email to "billing" and await a reply. I have lost a lot of time and money. No way to contact the company and my computer is now clustered with a useless program impossible to remove. Shame there is no 0 rating.

muchfedup: This support document from InstallShield might help your situation: http://consumer.installshield.com/kb.asp?id=Q108464

I am absolutely disappointed by WinDVD 8. As as producer of DVD-Audio disks, up to now I used and recommended to my customers older versions of Inter Video WinDVD to play DVD-Audio Disks. I recently tried to update to WinDVD 8 and was not anymore able to play DVD-A's, not even my own disks. Apparently this feature was deliberately omitted in Win DVD 8 without any notice to potential customers. Fortunately Cyberlink's PowerDVD and Creative's DVD-A Player still work with DVD-A's. Don't ever update programs if not absolutely necessary! Gregor Antes, www.laborantes.com

laboraudio: WinDVD 8 does not have DVD-Audio playback due to issues that relates to people using it to rip the DVD-Audio discs. Our review did not really cover DVD-Audio in extensive detail, but I will be sure to update it to reflect this in the future.

WinDVD9 is a big disappointment for me. It completely removed DSP playback of MP3's. Even the equalizer is disabled. WinDVD's digital signal processing of mp3's is unrivaled. This has been the best reason why I use WinDVD and Corel completely ripped it off! The other complete disappointment is that WinDVD9 is memory hungry. It will drain most of your computer resources if you run it on an old system. It will keep crashing if you force it to play something and poke around the settings. I'm reinstalling back WinDVD7, the most stable so far.

As for me, the original (InterVideo) WinDVD8 Platinum is the best software DVD player so far, mostly due to appeal and Trimension technology. The main disadvantages of Corel WinDVD9 when compared to older version are: 1) The absence of "Pan&Scan" function (Zoom&Pan works quite different); 2) Every time started, the Trimension technology has to be enabled manually; 3) When enabled "all2hd" and/or Trimension, the brightness, contrast, saturation etc. can only be changed from graphics control panel - the appropriate sliders in WinDVD9 become disabled. 4) The absence of Video- and AudioCenter is disappointing. 5) The new skin is ugly (subjective).

WInDVD 9 can be a good product features-wise, it is just very unstable, especially on Vista 64 platform. Bluray and even regular DVD discs would play sometimes but vey inconsistent and then you would get the MFC error nag and the application closes. Meanwhile the code still runs on the background consuming tons of CPU resources. The SUPPORT for the producr is even more atrocious. I opened up a ticket and all I got back was this pre-canned, computer generated response. I am computer savvy (systems programmer) and tried eveything that I know and heeded known solution suggestions from the different web sites to no avail. All it did for me was plenty of headaches and a few sleepless nights. I will not recommend this product to anyone.t